A variety of personal care compositions are available to the consumer to provide skin care benefits and to counteract what many consider undesirable “signs of skin aging,” such as fine lines, wrinkles and uneven skin texture. Personal care compositions may provide chronic benefits that materialize over a prescribed period of time. To be most effective, these products must be applied regularly and over an extended period of time. To encourage routine usage, it is important that the product have a desirable appearance and a pleasant feel when applied. Consumers desiring more benefit and/or protection often will choose a thicker product. For example, a cream composition tends to be perceived as offering greater anti-aging benefits than a lotion. However, creams tend to have a heavy feel, and may be undesirable for use during the day, under make-up, or during warm and/or humid weather conditions. Other product forms such as milks or oils tend to run rapidly off the skin surface and may soil surrounding clothing or other surfaces before the product can be sufficiently rubbed into the skin. It is desirable to provide creamy personal care composition having solid physical characteristics that maybe applied and rubbed into the skin.
Existing solid personal care compositions often incorporate solidifying agents but such solidifying agents provide formulation trade-offs. For example, solidifying agents having the best thermal stability often do not result in personal care compositions having good rub-in characteristics. Alternatively, certain solidifying agents, which have reduced thermal stability, often yield personal care compositions having good rub-in and skin absorbency. The skin care products having these later types of solidifying agents may be formulated with improved thermal stability through rheological modification such as internal phase packing when a large volume of a dispersed or emulsified internal phase thickens or through the inclusion of an elastomer.
Storage and delivery presents another issue for skin care compositions having a solid character. Even if a solid personal care composition is formulated to exhibit thermal stability and to have good rub-in characteristics, the solid personal care composition may be adversely affected by the delivery device (e.g., solid character is destroyed, phases separate, etc.). Traditional open mouth jars may be a suitable container, but are generally disfavored by consumers. Open mouth jars are viewed as less sanitary since jars lack a dispensing means. Instead, a user must dip a finger or other implement into the composition into order to remove a portion for application and may become soiled, adulterated, or contaminated. Furthermore, open jars provide no mechanism for metering a portion of the composition for application; this results in fluctuations in the amount of composition used from one application to the next. Pumps containers solve many of the problems associated with open mouth jars by providing a sanitary means for dispensing a prescribed amount of a composition. However, many conventional pumps present problems delivering compositions having requisite thermal stability while also containing solidifying agents with advantageous rub-in characteristics. Many pumps are simply unable to reliably dispense skin care compositions that have a solid character. The pump mechanism has difficulty in transporting thick, viscous skin care compositions. Even if the pump is able to dispense the skin care composition, the pump often adversely affects the solid character of the composition upon dispensation. It is believed that the pump mechanism and process disturb the balance achieved between solid character, thermal stability, and good rub-in characteristics. The net result being that the composition shears and loses a significant portion of the solid character during pumping.
Therefore, a need exists to provide a personal care product comprising a personal care composition, which has a solid character that conveys increased benefit and provide improved skin feel, in a dispensing container that retains the unique characteristics of the composition.